Christ Methodist Church Memphis
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Christ Methodist Church Memphis
Marriage and the Gospel | Grant Caldwell
Can marriage survive when it feels more like a struggle than joy? In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul points us beyond perfection and into the promise of a gospel-shaped love—one that echoes God’s covenant even in the midst of brokenness.
Well, good morning. Welcome to Worship at Christ Methodist. My name is Grant Caldwell. I serve as one of our pastors here. If you have your Bibles with you, go ahead and open them up to 1 Corinthians chapter 7. 1 Corinthians chapter 7, we're going to be looking at verses 1 through 16 today. 1 Corinthians 7 verses 1 through 16, as you turn to it, is one of those passages that, to quote Pastor Paul, you may get to and go, So, but all scripture is important and it is especially the passages that the church needs to understand in its clearest sense and declare in all of their truth and all of their beauty, which is what we will do together today with 1 Corinthians 7, 1 through 16. To understand a passage in 1 Corinthians, I shared this a few weeks ago, what you need to do is find the problem. Like if you can find the problem, you can understand the passage in 1 Corinthians. The passage here, really, that we'll be looking at for the next three weeks in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, the problem that they're looking at and struggling with in the church in Corinth is they don't understand how their lives have changed now that they're in Christ.
Throughout 1 Corinthians 7, there's an issue at play where the before Christ and after Christ, That divide in conversion has created some confusion in the church. They're asking the question, what stays? What moves on? What is different now? What is exactly the same? And so Paul breaks that down in a bunch of varying issues throughout chapter 7, the first of which is that of marriage. And so 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 1 through 16, hear the word of the Lord. Paul says, Now concerning the matters about which you wrote, it's good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman. But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.
Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps for by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
Now as a concession, not a command, I say this. I wish that all were as I myself am, but each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am, but if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry, for it is better to marry than burn with passion.
To the married I give this charge, not I, but the Lord. The wife should not separate from her husband, but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband, and the husband should not divorce his wife. To the rest I say, I, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. If the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases, the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? For how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Okay, so let's understand what this passage has to say about marriage and what Paul is teaching us in regards to marriage. Before we look at the passage again and find that understanding, I just want to address something that you may be asking. You may be thinking in your head, wow, Grant, you're a little young to be addressing topics of marriage. and to reassure you and to set everyone at peace. I just want to show you this picture. Not that one. That one's great. That one. Yeah, we'll get to that one. That is our family. We'll get there. This picture, though, is my proof of why I'm qualified to handle this. As you can see, the cabinet door above our coffee is closed.
There we go. Now, let me tell you this. First year of Marriage Grant, I'm making coffee and walking on. Fifth year of Marriage Grant, I'm making coffee and walking on. As we're entering into, we'll be celebrating 10 in September. And I knew I was going to be preaching to you guys about marriage. That cabinet's been closed all week to prepare for this moment right here. I've made it, y'all. We are perfect. Everything is good to go. And I have no greater thing that I can do to show that I'm trustworthy than to say that I finally learned how to close the cabinet after making coffee. Obviously, I'm joking. The other picture is our family. I am married. That's my wife, Casey, and our son, Caden. Casey and I have been married, like I said, it will be 10 years in September. However, Casey is the literal reason I'm here. And so about a decade ago, we moved from Knoxville to Memphis for Casey to do the Memphis teacher residency, which led me to Christ Methodist. But she's also the actual reason I'm standing here due to just her wisdom, her strength, her grace, her love, whether in our house or at our classroom at Richland or with people that she's around. She has this gift of creating space where people can feel known and loved and can truly grow.
And even in that, we know, like an open cabinet door that she has to continually come behind and close, we both know that our marriage and our family is not perfect. Marriage can be joyous, life-giving, and fulfilling. and marriage can also be hard, messy, and challenging. I know for some of you, the topic of discussing marriage on a Sunday morning is making you want to lean in. I know that there are others though that are wondering if you sneak out, how bright is the sun on this Memphis day that everyone would see you sneaking out? And if that's you, be at peace because I believe this passage has something important to say. Russell Moore, editor-in-chief at Christianity Today acknowledges this tension in his book, The Storm-Tossed Family. He says, family can be the source of some of the most transcendent human joy, and family can leave us crumpled up on the side of the road. Family can make us who we are, and family can break our hearts. Family is difficult because family, every family, is an echo of the gospel.
And so today, whether marriage brings feelings of joy or sorrow, I want us to explore together what a gospel-shaped, gospel-echoing marriage looks like. And that is found only when we look vertically towards God and towards the gospel instead of looking horizontally at each other or in comparison about marriage. We live in a world that is so confused about marriage. And in that confusion, defining and discovering marriage is a crucial act for the church to do. For some, marriage is the ultimate thing. It's this identity-defining factor, the thing that has to happen for you to be truly human. For others, though, marriage is this meaningless formality. It's a piece of paper that gets in the way of love. It's the finale of a reality TV show.
Understanding marriage in light of the gospel is crucial. It's crucial for our good, and it's also crucial for God's glory to be seen in our witness.
And so today, as we explore it, I want us to just discover God's design in marriage, our challenges and problems that are associated with it, and the hope that we have that brings those two things together. But before we get into it, will you just join me in prayer around this topic? Father, we do seek to glorify you, and we desire to make much of your Son, Jesus Christ, through the hearing and through the understanding of your word. We know that marriage is glorious but hard. It's wonderful and rewarding, yet difficult and painful, and that is because following you and knowing you are all of these things as well.
And so we pray that your Holy Spirit would open our eyes and ears to see and hear this echo of the gospel, this mystery that teaches so much beyond what the eye sees. And we ask all of this in the name of your Son. Amen.
Amen. So first, we ask the question of what is God's design for marriage? Inherent in the question, we have to acknowledge and say that God does have a design for marriage that followers of Jesus believe. And it's centered around this idea of covenant. A covenant is a binding formal agreement between two parties. It's a promise for the future that includes both legality and love wed together. Tim Tennant argues that marriage is the primary covenantal image of God's nature, as the binding, promise-keeping nature of marriage is the first echo that we have of God's binding, promise-keeping love for us as his creation. As you open your Bibles in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, the covenant of marriage is there, present and beautifully seen in the creation story. The Bible opens with God making all kinds of good things, things that complement each other and go together. Heaven and earth, the sea and the dry land, and of course, man and woman, Adam and Eve, two people, two image bearers of God in all of their glory, created to become one, one new beautiful union together. Right at the start of Genesis, at the climax of God's good creation, we see this picture of marriage. Genesis chapter 2 verses 24 and 25 say this Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother And hold fast to his wife And they shall become one flesh And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
This concept of becoming one flesh, two in union, becoming one, shapes and defines Christian marriage. It shows us that Christian marriage is the true intimacy between one man and one woman, spiritually, relationally, and physically, in a loving, lifelong covenant. Anytime that there is a compromise or change in any of these aspects, problems start to arise, whether that's in who is getting married, whether it's in the length of the marriage, whether that's in the intimacy that's found within it. Much of our cultural confusion about marriage centers around this reality that we have misunderstood God's good design in marriage. We begin the conversation with cultural values or personal preference, and then we try to add what God's Word says as kind of the third piece to complete that, rather than letting God's Word speak, authoritatively first and guide us and direct us on this. To quote Timothy Keller in his book, Meaning of Marriage, we believe this about marriage, that if God invented marriage, then those who enter it should make every effort to understand and submit to his purposes for it. We do this in many other aspects of our life. Think of buying a car. If you purchase a vehicle, a machine well beyond your own ability to create, you will certainly take up the owner's manual and abide by what the designer says the car needs by way of treatment and maintenance. To ignore it would be to court disaster.
God's good design for marriage shows that marriage is a good thing. It's given by God. Scripture says it's not good for man to be alone. We were created for relationship. We were created for companionship. And God is good to let husbands and wives share their lives together in relational and physical and spiritual intimacy, in this loving lifelong covenant together. And this is true and defining of it, no matter what problems might arise.
And we know that problems do come, as the next chapter in Genesis shows us. And so let's ask, what are marriage's challenges that we see?
Anyone that has been married or knows married people know that marriages come with their share of issues. In the scriptures, again, the issues that we see in marriage come right after, in the very next chapter in Genesis 3, those that describe the marital union. Adam and Eve, created to live in peace in God's design, choose to leave it. And any time you leave and depart from God's good design, the Bible calls this sin. And Adam and Eve in their sin, one of the first ways that sin and brokenness is displayed in the Bible is in the context of marriage together. Created for intimacy together and intimacy with God. They hide from God. They start to fight each other and blame each other. They start to control and dominate one another. Sin enters marriage, brokenness ensues, and then problems arise. And the pattern continues throughout the Old Testament. It repeats over and over again, which is continuing and brings us back to Corinth. Corinth is specifically struggling with the ways that they're approaching marriage. They've forgotten God's good design, and as a result of forgetting God's good design in their marriages, are having all sorts of cultural problems based on the city that they're living in. And there's two main problems that the passage that I read really center on.
One issue is their struggles with physical intimacy, and the other is their struggles with divorce. And so let's consider them both at hand in Corinth and how they kind of speak to us today. First, verses 1 through 5 show us their issues with physical intimacy. In Corinth, the context here is important. We've discussed this a few times in our series on 1 Corinthians. Corinth is a city known for and struggling frequently with sexual immorality. Last week, Pastor Paul covered in chapter 6 the ways that this was directly affecting the church, that that immorality from the outside of the culture was working its way in to the church, kind of like water coming inside of a boat.
Chapter 6 shows us that if God's design for marriage is like a road, many in Corinth had veered their car off the side of the road into a ditch of allowing this immorality to affect their marriages by pursuing physical intimacy outside of God's good design in marriage. Chapter 7 shows us that there's a ditch, though, on the other side of the road that many in Corinth are also falling into, and that is that they were not pursuing physical intimacy at all, even within the marriage.
It seems that in opposition to the culture around them, there were some in Corinth that developed a view of avoidance of all intimacy between husband and wife. And Paul acknowledges that while there are seasons for that, to devote yourself to prayer, that this is not to be the norm in marriage. That becoming Christian doesn't mean that you set aside physical intimacy because doing so hinders the one flesh union that marriage consists of. And in Corinth was opening the door frequently for temptation. They had erred in their design, erred in their understanding of God's good design in marriage, and it was affecting the church specifically with this topic of physical intimacy.
But it also affects, in another way, in their look at the permanency of marriage and how they are approaching divorce and separation. And you see this again in verses 10 through 16. In 10 through 16, he's teaching the church that becoming Christian doesn't mean that you set aside the lifelong nature of marriage. But note that in 10 and 12, he makes like a really careful distinction that if you don't see it or understand what he's doing there, you might miss the full context of why he's giving the commands that he's giving to Corinth specifically. Notice in 10, he says that this charge isn't from him, but from the Lord. And from that, we're seeing that Paul, in giving this command about the permanency of marriage, is pointing back to Jesus' teaching on marriage found in the Gospels. In Matthew 5, in Matthew 19, we see that Jesus is reaffirming this one flesh union from Genesis 2 and showing that the lifelong nature of marriage and of the marital covenant is God's ideal, except for in the cases of sexual immorality. And Paul's reminding them that what Jesus said then to reaffirm what was found in Genesis 2 continues for them in Corinth today.
But then in verse 12, he shifts the argument and gives something just a little bit different that's important. He says the charge is from him, not the Lord. And it's important to notice that when you see that, he's not saying that what he has to say is unimportant. He's not saying that it's not authoritative. He's cluing us in as we're reading it, that he's addressing a situation that's new in Corinth that wasn't addressed previously in the Bible. And then he's addressing it with Christian wisdom. Again, if the overarching theme of 1 Corinthians 7 is what changes from becoming Christian, from I wasn't a Christian and now I am Christian, what seems to be happening in Corinth at this time is that the church was made up of a large group of Gentile or non-Jewish believers that were not Christian when they got married. They were both non-believers. And since then, one of them has become a believer and the other hasn't. And they're asking the question, what do I do? How do I handle this change in my life in view of God's calling?
What stays, what changes? And Paul says that, again, the design of marriage is to be lifelong between husband and wife. But in this situation, the guidance he gives them is that everything rests on the non-believing spouse. That if a non-believing spouse stays, the believer stays and entrusts that the family will be set apart in some sense, receive the positive influence and blessings of the believing spouse. If the non-believing spouse leaves, though, and abandons, the believer can separate and then remarry if that's desired. They don't have to wait indefinitely. They don't have to feel the burden that they have to be the one that brings the non-believer back. Paul gives them the promise that they can be at peace.
And so when we hold these two things up together, when we look at them in the context of Corinth, we see that they have issues in understanding God's good design for marriage and how it's been applied in their current culture. They're off in their physical intimacy, and they're off in their approach to divorce. They've settled for a picture of marriage that's less than the flourishing that's found within God's good design. And many of our problems with marriage are similar to that. While they may not be the same exact things in the same exact cultural context that we see in 1 Corinthians 7, many of our issues with marriage, again, go back to this lack of understanding
of God's design of marriage and how then it works its way out into our lives. We often settle for less, and as a result of settling for less, problems usually arise.
With us, though, the issues of these things, especially the issues of physical intimacy and the issues of permanency, these things in our culture are often being wed more with the issue. Like if in Corinth, the issue was more of a legalistic, ascetic, kind of trying to separate from the culture route, our issues with marriage, which more of this, is highly valuing just this value of autonomy and seeking to get what we want in the context of marriage.
Tim Keller discusses this idea again in Meaning for Marriage, showing that there's a distinction between God's design of marriage found in a covenant and the cheap replacement that we often settle with, seeing marriage as a commodity. And in commodities, you seek to get what you can receive out of it, whereas a covenant, you seek to do what you can give. Quoting him again here, he says, Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society, the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that were historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today, we stay connected to people only as long as they're meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit, that is when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we're getting back, when we cut our losses and drop the relationship. This has also been called commodification A process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships And so the very idea of covenant is disappearing in our culture.
When marriage is a commodity The only lens that you have for physical intimacy Is inward on yourself and what you can receive When marriage is a commodity The only lens that you have of permanency Is how long you want it to last When sinned against And Corinth shows that there's always going to be a problem when we lessen God's ideal for marriage, when we move and stray from God's design in marriage.
So if God's design is up here, our problems are down here, the question we have to answer then is where is our hope that bridges the gap between these two things? And our hope is not in anything that we do. Our hope is in understanding marriage as an echo and picture of the gospel.
This understanding of the gospel provides background music for this passage that really gives Paul's authority of why what they were doing in Corinth is wrong. For in the gospel, what we see in marriage is not a picture of commodity where we prove our value to God and then He responds back to us in relationship. We see the picture of covenant. We see a picture of a God that is promise-keeping and that does anything and everything possible to get us back into right relationship with Him, even when we run away, even when we mess up, and even when we fall short. You see, when Adam and Eve sin in the garden in Genesis 3, there was judgment. But in the judgment, there was also grace. God sets out in grace to bring restoration to the couple. He sought after them and did what was necessary for them to live and to not die. And this pattern continues throughout the Old Testament as God establishes a special relationship with Israel. And when he describes that relationship in the Bible, one of the metaphors and pictures that he uses most frequently is that of marriage. God is the groom and Israel is his bride. Even when unfaithful, in the book of Hosea, the message continues that God is determined to take those that are unworthy. He's determined to take those that fail. He's determined to take those that can't get it together and bring them back into relationship with him.
This pattern continues repeatedly until it reaches its fullness where God himself in the person of Jesus enters into our broken world to redeem his people and restore our relationship with him by paying for our sins on the cross. It's no accident that when Jesus describes this in his life, again, the picture and metaphor that he reaches to frequently is that of marriage. He is now the groom and the church is his bride. Paul reaffirms this again in Ephesians 5, reaffirming that there's more that's going on than what the eye sees when they look at husband and wife, that when two people see a believer married, when they see husband and wife married in Christ, they don't see them. They see this profound mystery of the gospel. They see this profound mystery of how Jesus sacrificially loved and redeemed his bride on the cross and how on the cross we're brought back to being his. We're called to remember, verse 23 of 1 Corinthians 7, that we've been bought with a price. And we remember that we've been bought with a price. It changes the way that we approach our marriages. We remember that because of Jesus' great sacrifice to us and for us, we can approach marriage likewise with this calling and desire to sacrifice for one another.
Just as God's marriage to us cost him nothing less than the death of his son, our marriages carry within them the costly reminders of sacrificial love, laying down our lives over and over again for one another. Their essence isn't selfish commodity. What can we get? Their essence is loving covenant. What can we give? And this is what Paul is calling Corinth back to in this passage, trusting and knowing that the sacrificial love of Jesus makes us sacrificial love, sacrificial spouses to one another.
In regards to physical intimacy, look what Paul does. He points them back to the sacrificial love of the covenant, reminding them that they've been bought with a price and their bodies are not their own anymore. They're to be given to one another. And this was and is countercultural. In Roman culture, the theme was dominance. The husband alone had soul authority over bodies and often pursued intimacy outside of marriage, at will. Now the theme in our culture is much more autonomy. The sexual revolution has shifted things where it's unheard of to enter into a relationship where you would give the authority of your body over to another. But when approached through the lens of the gospel and approached through a gospel-echoing marriage, these things point us towards God's design. We see that physical intimacy in the context of marriage is a joyful act of living within God's design as husband and wife. It's a regular act of renewing the covenant of marriage together. It's not founded on manipulation or seeking one's pleasure, but it's a good gift given from God to us to be expressed in this covenantal relationship.
Jesus' sacrificial love creates in us the ability and desire to be sacrificial to one another. In regards to divorce and separation, Paul points them to the reality that their bodies have been bought with a price. He points them to the sacrificial love found in the covenant that the ideal is to remain married and not to leave one or the other, except for in the cases of sexual immorality or abandonment. That when sinned against, many people view that as a reason that the value of the relationship is gone and they can run away. But Paul is calling Christians to see that they do not and should not because they're part of a greater story and the story of the gospel. And again, this was countercultural then. It's countercultural now. It doesn't make it easy. I mean, standing steadfast and living sacrificially is hard work. We have to learn continually over and over again to lay our lives down for one another, as Jesus has done for us. But we're promised that as these things take work, they're the very things that our marriages are made for. Like they're the oil that calls the car to run in the way that it was intended to run. That the sacrificial love of Jesus requires and then makes us sacrificial spouses to one another.
The hope in Paul's message in 1 Corinthians 7 that extends to us today is that when understood properly as an echo for the gospel, marriages must be called to the highest ideals that God designs them. He sets the bar high. But more than that, not just must they, but when lived in response to the perfect, all-sufficient sacrifice of Jesus for his bride, the church, and when lived in a way that's empowered by the Holy Spirit, who guides, empowers, and convicts us to live in a different way, we gain the ability to actually do this, to actually sacrifice for one another, to actually live in a different way than just seeking after what we can receive in marriage or seeking what we can get. That doesn't make our marriages perfect. That doesn't make them all together, but it makes them faithful. It makes them steady, it makes them self-sacrificing, and as a result, it makes them life-giving.
They can be centered on sacrifice, placing the good of the other above the good of yourself. And as that happens, we're promised that the world will notice it. The world will notice the way that husband and wife live together within the home, but more than that, the world will notice the way that husband and wife continually, submit to one another, sacrifice for one another, live in this different way. And as they do that together, it doesn't just affect what happens within the home. It then starts to send them out onto mission together. And marriages on mission are a beautiful way to point people towards the coming kingdom of God. Marriages on mission, both jointly sacrificing, jointly loving, jointly holding this high view of covenant together out into the world is one of the ways that people see the coming kingdom of God.
We are promised in the scriptures that one day our creator God will restore and redeem and make whole every broken piece of this world, every broken relationship, every broken body, every broken thing that you see. One day it is all going to be remade whole again. And the picture that God gives of that, not surprising as you look through the lens of the gospel throughout Genesis to Revelation, when you look at the picture of it in Revelation 21, the picture that God gives of what happens when this world is remade is that one is one of a wedding. It's one of marriage. We're promised that at the end of the story, at the end of the Bible in Revelation 21, the new Jerusalem will come down like a bride adorned for her husband. And we'll see that this is what God had in mind all along, that marriage would be a way to point people to the coming kingdom where all things are brought together anew again in Christ, that all things are brought together in Christ into this new family, where all come together around the throne as one.
And until that day, we are called as the church to live faithfully into this design, to be people that are known for our sacrificial love for one another, and to let that sacrifice pour out of our marriages in a way that leads us onto mission and leads us in a way to living differently in a world that is greatly confused about marriage.
Let us try and attempt, and by God's grace, faithfully do this and live in response to this beautiful echo of the gospel we see in Scripture. Let's pray together.
Father, in your goodness, you have designed and given marriage to the world. And while we know that marriage is part of your grace to all creation, those of us that are here this morning that are seeking to follow you and claim to know you, know that you have given us a fuller picture of his design that we're to live into. And so we pray to you, asking that we would be a people, both within our marriages and within this church, that would view marriage through the highly exalted lens that you give. For those of us in this room that are married, we pray that you would equip us to live into that picture. Pray that you would be present in our marriages as we choose to make sacrificial love our highest aim and choose to make the beauty of the covenantal relationship that we have in you the essence of our marriage. For unmarried and desiring this, we pray that you would surround us with a spiritual family within this congregation that models this faithfully while also honoring their singleness. We pray that the picture of family that the world would see would be a beautiful image found within this congregation of married and single alike coming together around the throne of God.
And Father, as we seek to do this, let us not settle for any picture of marriage that is less than the loving sacrificial picture of covenant we see in you. As we fall short and do so repeatedly within marriage, remind us regularly of the sacrificial love of your son, how you pursue after us in our sins and failures to bring us back to you. Remind us in the gospel how you see more in us, that we aren't the worst sins that we've committed, but our sons and daughters of the king, heirs of a kingdom that we often can't even wrap our minds around, and messengers of the gospel. And we pray and ask all of this in Jesus's name. Amen.